That all changed in one febrile evening at the North Greenwich Arena. A night that started with a mini-concert from Pixie Lott ended in triumph for the equally impish Louis Smith, captain of the Great Britain team that surged to the most unexpected of bronze medals.

“Still to this day, that team final medal for us is just the shocker, the one that doesn’t really sink in,” Smith said. “I cannot believe that the men’s Great Britain gymnastics team beat America, Germany, Russia, Ukraine. We came third behind China and Japan: that is unbelievable.”

The North Greenwich Arena – which reverted to being named after a mobile phone company once the hot-pink apparatus had been removed – is used to hosting stars of the calibre of Bruce Springsteen or the Rolling Stones. The five men in the British team were rather less feted names, even if Smith had won bronze on the pommel horse in Beijing.

With long-time regular Daniel Keating absent through a combination of injury and lack of form, the bulk of the scoring was done by Dan Purvis and Kristian Thomas. Neither bore a close resemblance to the sylphlike gymnasts dancing across the arena on behalf of the Chinese and Japanese teams.

Purvis is a muscular, hobbit-like figure with gingerish hair and a pair of shoulders that looked like giant hams. Thomas is taller, resembling no one in the world of sport as much as the hulking Welsh three-quarter Jamie Roberts.

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In between tumbles, he moved with the solid deliberation of a Tonka toy. Yet when he leapt, he defied gravity.

Thomas’s breathtaking vault – a backwards double-somersault, or Yurchenko double pike for the purists – returned a score of 16.550, the highest individual total from any gymnast in the competition.

The vault is usually the best-rewarded piece of apparatus, and the British team promptly climbed three places into second. It was the moment when 16,500 spectators began to realise that the miracle could become reality.

“Kristian’s vault was definitely the standout moment,” said Eddie van Hoof, the technical director of the men’s team. “It gave the whole team a major boost with three apparatus still to go. He had been practising it in training, but to go out and complete it for the first time in competition, and not even take a step when he landed, was absolutely brilliant.”

To van Hoof’s mind, the team’s underperformance at the world championships in October 2011 – where they finished in 10th place – turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

“It meant that we had to come to the O2 for the test event in January, to seal our qualification. So by the time of the Olympics we were very comfortable with the Dome and all the apparatus there.”

A fall from Sam Oldham on the high bar set the British team back a little, but they still came into the final apparatus – the floor, which also tends to attract high marks – with a strong chance if they nailed their routines.

Purvis, Thomas and Max Whitlock were all note-perfect, and there was a moment – as Japan’s Kohei Uchimura came unstuck on his pommel-horse dismount – when it even looked as if they might have snuck into silver-medal position.

Then came a confusing 10 minutes. Many of the spectators found themselves staring at the scoreboard without much idea what was going on.

Eventually it emerged that Uchimura had appealed, and the judges had agreed that his dismount should be credited to his score, even though it had been a calamitous one. The extra 0.7 marks carried Japan back up into second, not that Smith and company seemed too fussed.

“After 100 years, who cares?” Smith said. “Silver, bronze, is anyone actually bothered? Because I’m not. This is what we’ve been working towards. For it to come together on this day is incredible.”

Van Hoof reckons that the athletes’ gracious reaction represented “good public relations” for the whole of British gymnastics. “I’ve heard that the president of the international federation has spoken more than once about the sportsmanship of the British team.

“Having said that, I still don’t understand why the Japanese gymnast was credited with a dismount score. At any other time over the last two years of judging in this cycle, he wouldn’t have been given those points.

"The B jury, which consisted of two expert judges, one of them Japanese, agreed that he shouldn’t be rewarded, but the FIG technical committee ruled otherwise. It might sound like sour grapes now but the decision was a strange one.”

To celebrate their bronze, Smith and his team-mates would set off on a holiday to Marbella at the end of the Games. But at this moment, on the evening of the first Monday, their fine achievement failed to offset a wider anxiety. Britain still had no gold medals to shout about.

Over at the Excel Centre, Zoe Smith might have lifted a British record of 121kg in the clean and jerk that morning, but there had been disappointing news from the Aquatic Centre, where neither backstroker Gemma Spofforth nor the synchronised diving team of Tom Daley and Pete Waterfield were able to get on the podium.

So where would Britain’s first Olympic champion – or champions – come from? The answer was not yet imminent but the momentum was starting to build.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“History tells you that every time we see something ‘unbelievable’, it turns out later on there was doping involved.”John Leonard, of the USA Swimming Coaches Association, on Ye Shiwen’s record-breaking Games